Category Archives: Writing

Eat your words is back on February 5th! If you haven’t participated in this mashup of stories, chefs, bartenders and urban foodies, this week’s event will make you salivate with stories inspired by a food politics. It’ll be the best meal and food memory you ever ate!

A Live Storytelling Event hosted by Greg Walloch Eat Your Words will be an intimate intimate evening of storytelling in the tradition of:

The Moth and

This American Life

Each show features a rotating cast of the city’s most

outstanding storytellers and comedians with special guest appearances.

“L.A. audiences don’t seem to actually eat very much food, so they might as well come to a show where they can hear all about it.”

The Directors Lab West Steering Committee has opened applications for its sixteenth annual Directors Lab West, taking place Saturday, May 23 through Saturday, May 30, 2015.

Now entering its 16th year, the annual Lab brings together dedicated emerging and mid-career theatre directors and choreographers with master artists for an eight-day long intensive, enabling them to inspire each other to dream and create the future of American Theatre.

The deadline to submit the application is Friday, March 6, 2015 at

5 pm PST.

There is no cost to participate, however attendance is by application only. Applicants should have experience as a professional director and/or choreographer; students are encouraged to apply for internships.

For more details on the application process, including the full eligibility criteria, and for more details on Directors Lab West, please visit: directorslabwest.com

Directors Lab West is produced by the Directors Lab West Steering Committee, in association with the The Pasadena Playhouse and with the generous support of the Stage Directors & Choreographers Society.

About Directors Lab West
Directors Lab West fosters an intensive laboratory environment where a community of directors and choreographers inspire each other to dream and create the future of American Theatre. The Lab, which was spun off of Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab in 2000, brings together theatre directors and choreographers to participate in a week long series of workshops, panels, roundtables, and symposia with some of the nation’s leading theatre artists. In the last 14 years, over 100 acclaimed artists have given their time to the Lab including Jason Alexander, Julie Arenal, Luis Alfaro, Paris Barclay, Cirque Berzerk, Kay Cole, Gordon Davidson, George Furth, Moises Kaufman, Ming Cho Lee, Marc Masterson, Randy Newman, Vincent Paterson, Carey Perloff, Stephen Wadsworth and Charlayne Woodard.

This popped into the email box this morning and definitely needed a share. Sounding somewhat like annual NanoWriting events, the Summer Writing Project is a must for all aspiring/and or already publishing authors to get words on paper and a voice out in the ether!

Black Hill Press and JukePop are collaborating with California Public Libraries to advocate writing and support reading with their Summer Writing Project.

This joint venture presents authors with the opportunity to craft their novellas a chapter at a time with immediate quantitative and qualitative feedback from their readers, while also broadcasting their words to an audience eager for the next great storyteller. The Summer Writing Project begins on June 1, 2014 and continues through August 31, 2014.

J. Dylan Yates was raised on a on a tiny, New England peninsula. Her debut novel, “The Belief in Angels”, was written over the course of many years while she attempted a number of BA-related jobs, including: teaching, corporate training, real estate, nursing, interior design, parenting, and reluctant housewifery. Prior to publication, her book won the Alexis Masters Scholarship Award at the February 2012 San Francisco Writers Conference. Yates is a professional musician.

Michele Matheson lives in L.A. with her husband, son and daughter. She has been an accomplished actress from an early age, both in film and television, and has also found success as a singer and keyboard player for bands such as Action Daddy and The Black Tales. Currently, she is working on her second novel as well as doing illustrations for a children’s book, and she is thoroughly enjoying her new life as a mom.

David Kendrick came to Los Angeles by way of a phone call from the legendary Kim Fowley. He has played with 90 bands more or less. Some of note have been Gleaming Spires, Sparks, DEVO and Andy Prieboy. He is an avid collector of odd art and some of his finds have appeared in Clown Paintings by Diane Keaton. David’s ongoing music project – “The Empire Of Fun” to date has released a box set plus six other collections, including the fiction story CD set “I’m sorry Mr. Kendrick, there’s a skull inside your head.” Recently he has had essays on cycads and fear published by the Laboratory Arts collective Hymn magazine.

Marley Klaus is a former Emmy-nominated 60 Minutes producer who also created the award-winning California public television newsmagazine, California Connected. After leaving journalism, she co-wrote a pilot for a television series with Tom Fontana, her short story “Cleaning Up” was a finalist in the 2008 Faulkner-Wisdom short story competition, she’s working on a novel, and is going through whatever training newcomers get in the seven major religious traditions and writing about it in her blog: The Heathen Learns. www.marleytheheathen@blogspot.com

Lauren Eggert-Crowe is a well rounded writer of poetry, essays, book reviews, interviews, and cultural reportage. She was raised in rural Pennsylvania and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from The U. of Arizona. She was voted Best Poet of Santa Cruz in in 2010 and 2011. Her poetry has also been set to music, in “Diary of a Black Widow,” a multisectional song setting by contemporary composer Christopher Pratorius, which premiered with the Santa Cruz Chamber Players in 2010. She has written 2 chapbooks and has published the highly regarded feminist ‘zine, Galatea’s Pants

Amilia Spicer has performed across a good portion of the USA, appearing at many festivals and clubs. She has two CDs Like and Engine and Seamless. Her music has been described as intimate, dreamlike, lighthearted, and moody.

There is usually ample street parking, but meters need to be fed till 8pm. Read the signs carefully, but don’t park on Cahuenga. There is a parking lot right behind the club for 6 bucks or so or there are other lots on Selma between Cahuenga and Cole for 5-6 dollars.

Studio C Artists is currently presenting a new original solo work “Man Up” by NYFA Fellowship and Critics Choice at BACA recipient (also Bourbon Street pilot) writer, Jonuel Pozo, performed by writer/actor/dancer/choreographer Derek Ringold. It’s a “no holds barred”, scathing dissertation of what it really means to be a Peter Pan and asks the question: “But for gay men… is it ever really possible to leave Neverland?”

Set smack in the middle of a young gay man’s life, “Man Up” excavates debilitating inner dialogs, blighting insecurities and spiraling behaviors. Exposed are nightly episodes of raw sex, recreational drug use, and bad boy on boy relationships, one of which turns extremely violent.“Man Up” leaves barely a stone unturned on the road to perdition for Mr. Ringold who is caught in a self-imposed rerun of, “I can’t get a man to love me.”

Mr. Ringold uses dance, multimedia, and the spoken word to explore the hurdles faced by gay men trying to make the transition into manhood. This production is a personal journey which follows Mr. Ringold’s own soul search to become a responsible adult male and leave behind the ever-present temptations in the gay male world to remain one of the Lost Boys of West Hollywood.

Truthfully, if I were a hard core WEHO party boy, on one hand I’d get a kick out of watching some other “girl” losing it on stage. But on the other hand, I might get a bit queasy looking into this mirror.

Apart from shock value entertainment, which this show really isn’t (although the elements are outrageous), what “Man Up” does is far more interesting and purposeful; this story crosses “party lines” and gives a fairly neutral point of view about everyone, gay or straight, who struggles between the fantasy of staying young and fabulous forever and passing into the land of maturity.

With maturescence there is an opportunity to step into one’s true personal power. Being an adult has a lot of upside – stability, money, career fulfillment, relationship fulfillment; goals, dreams and desires no longer on hold or hard to achieve; less chaos, more happiness. But making that change also means you can never go back. It is the false perception and fear that our naïve, carefree, devil-may-care, more sexy self, will be left behind forever. And it gets Mr. Ringold almost every time.

However, Mr. Ringold is fortunate. He has an encouraging mom, whom he loves, an off-handed lucky encounter with a guidance counselor who challenges him to take on a mentorship role, and a slew of ancient ancestors who visit in the night, through clouds of smoke and dance, and who push him to making the one cataclysmic decision to change his life.

This is a story to really “get down” with. It’s so honest, filled with truth, humor and hope. There’s no where to hide and it can hit you where it hurts. It’s wonderfully dressed with the decadent shenanigans of Mr. Ringold and firmly supported by the precise writing of Mr. Pozo. Most important, in a very straightforward way, it clarifies the “struggle” and how every one of us gets to “the other side” while failing, falling, overcoming, achieving and even inspiring (others).

“Man Up” not only exposes Mr. Ringolds, but our own, greatest fears and the potential for our greatest joys.

Two Thumbs Up! This show is truly a success story for Mr. Ringold and a MUST SEE while it’s still here.

by Tracey Paleo, Gia On The Move

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Dark and twisted, Rogue Artists Ensemble managed to captivate audiences with a macabre take on the classic Italian tale (with a twist) Pinocchio. Not a dry eye in the house? Definitely not me.

Gia On The Move has been following this “still in development” project since last October, it sounded so promising; and Sunday’s live reading did not disappoint. Staged scenes, a newly conceptualized Pinocchio puppet, 3D animations, a variety of special effects and SONGS (oh yes they DID!) truly made for an intriguing, attention-keeping experience. Still in evolution, I’m betting that only good things can come from this show when it finally gets on its feet for real.

Read the breakdown below and follow Rogue Artists Ensemble, a unique company well-versed in the art of puppetry, on Twitter, Facebook and their website for updates. You will NOT want to miss this!

Storyline:

Geppetto a suffering man, yearns to reconnect with his lost family and gets much more than he bargained for. In this world-premiere play for mature audiences the cricket is killed, Blue haunts us all and the Dog Fish lurks in the corner waiting to help you confront your fears. As you live, and you die, what will you leave behind?

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